A couple of weeks ago Hans Bakker, who had never touched KOffice code before, started hacking on a Krita plugin for the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. Within a week or two he had a working plugin for Krita and it quickly became clear how cool these little devices are and how many possibilities for new user interaction paradigms they afford.

So Hans suggested contacting Ettore Pasquini from 3DConnexion about the possibility of them donating a SpaceNavigator to the KOffice project for testing purposes. Well, that was only last week, and this week a box with three SpaceNavigators already landed on my desk. These are nice, solid feeling, attractive to handle things that come out of the box with drivers for Linux.

I will be distributing them among KOffice hackers for playing with and testing Hans' code this week, and I am sure that during the development of the KOffice 2 series of releases we will find more and more interesting uses for this unusual and fun interaction tool.

Could you also use it for drawing? The simplest thing might be to map the 3rd dimension to pressure, in order to re-use the way pressure-sensitive devices are handled. While this might not be the best idea, perhaps someone who is playing with the device can come up with a better one...